This confirms that a large portion of lead seals were on documents that were opened. This would lead to those lead seals being recast, which would suggest the remaining lead seals that were not recast are only a small proportion of the overall lead seals that were created.

We care about whether the documents were opened, because that would lead to seals being recast. Whether the documents were destroyed doesn’t tell us whether the documents were opened.

This tells us there was a lot of lead available for seals in the early Byzantine Empire compared to the lead remaining today. But were many more seals than what remain today actually created during the early Byzantine Empire? (C) doesn’t suggest many more seals were created.

Placing a limit on the number of documents that would have prevented recycling of the seal doesn’t support the author’s conclusion. In fact, if it were possible for 1 million documents that had seals that wouldn’t have been recycled, that would support the author’s conclusion.

The number of seals that were used simultaneously has no clear impact. The issue is the total number of documents that were sealed during the early Byzantine period; whether they were sealed at a given point in time isn’t relevant.